I had never drank anything alcoholic before in my life. When I was seven years old I was prevailed on to sign the pledge. My pledge card bound me to abstain by the grace of God from all spirituous liquors so long as I retained it. But my mother took the card from me and put it safely in the box-room with the Jacobean silver inherited from my Cheyne grandmother, Bishop Graves’ diamond ring which Queen Victoria gave him when he preached before her, our christening mugs, and the heavy early-Victorian jewellery bequeathed to my mother by the old lady whom she had looked after. And since box-room treasures never left the box-room, I regarded myself as permanently parted from my pledge. I liked the cherry-whisky a lot. The competitions started about one o’clock on a Saturday afternoon and went on until seven. I was drawn for the very first fight and my opponent by a piece of bad luck was Alan. Alan wanted me to scratch. I said I thought that it would look bad to do that. We consulted the house games-captain and he said: ‘No, the most sporting thing to do is to box it out and let the decision be on points; but don’t either of you hurt each other.’ So we boxed. Alan started showing off to his friends, who were sitting in the front row. I said: ‘Stop that. We’re boxing, not fighting,’ but a few seconds later he hit me again unnecessarily hard. I got angry and knocked him out. This was the first time I had ever knocked anyone out and I liked the feeling. I had drank a lot of cherry-whisky. I rather muzzily realized that I had knocked him out with a right swing on the side of the neck and that this blow was not part of the ordinary school-boxing curriculum. Straight lefts; lefts to body, rights to head; left and right hooks; all these were known, but the swing was somehow neglected, probably because it was not so ‘pretty.’